>> Did you know you can now learn what's new in
Visual Studio simply by just opening up the ID?
Come learn more about the new,
what's new experience on this episode of Visual Studio Toolbox.
[MUSIC]
>> Hello everyone.
Welcome to another episode of Visual Studio Toolbox.
I'm your host, Leslie Richardson and
today I'm joined by Grace from the Visual Studio Team.
We're going to be talking about what's new in
Visual Studio with a helpful little tool. Right, Grace?
>> Yeah. Thanks for having me, Leslie.
>> Thanks for being here.
Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself
and what it is we're chatting about today?
>> For sure. I work on
the Visual Studio platform team and we create
experiences that help make
developers more productive and more satisfied,
help developers personalize and customize Visual Studio as well.
Today we're talking about a what's
new experience that we've put together because we saw
that developers have been trying to find out
new interesting things about
Visual Studio that can help in their day-to-day workflow.
But there's so many features that come out each release that is
hard to learn about what's new in a timely manner,
especially after the update happens.
So we put together a curated list of features that
people can browse through and try after the update.
Awesome. That's basically that window that pops up sometimes
after you might've updated Visual Studio and
then you see like a list of news items.
That's like what used to exist in VS by got deprecated.
It was like VS news or something like that?
>> It is upgraded version of that.
You get to interact with your features.
You get things, try inline.
In fact, if you look at my screen right now,
you'll be able to see a selection of features here.
This is an older version of what's new.
But if you go ahead and open
your version of Visual Studio and update,
you'll be able to see a brand new set of
features that are available to you.
These are features that we've curated.
>> Yeah, I love the fact that this is personalized.
I think one of the greats that might have
existed with like VS news in the past was like,
this is sometimes cool information.
But I don't care about 95 percent of it because I don't
use or utilize those aspects of Visual Studio.
It's nice to get stuff that's tailored by your behavior.
>> That would be a good future edition.
This is personalization in curating
the feature to your workflow
is something that we're looking at down the road.
But what I mean, yeah,
no worries what I mean by curated is
Visual Studio picks a handful of features that we think
would be interesting and we think that are
new and big items for that release.
>> Yeah. I think that's important too,
because a lot of these features can get
buried because there's so much
going on in Visual Studio all the time.
It's nice to make sure all these different tools get there do.
I especially loved force around the cursor.
That's such a nifty debugging tip.
That's not a lot of people know about.
Being able to surface something like that,
that may not get like a keynote experience is cool.
>> Exactly. These can be
every day tips and tricks that can make your life a lot easier.
We also have platform capabilities where you
can start to disable or enable features
right from this area so that you don't have to
go and fiddle with the UI in order to play with the feature.
>> That's really exciting.
I like being able to just
enable the tool in the same window instead of
having to click out of it and then promptly forget
about how I'm even supposed to set it up.
>> Exactly. In this case,
we have screenshots of different features that have come out.
Then we also have a thumbs up and thumbs down mechanism.
If you feel that that feature really worked great for you,
feel free to hit that thumbs up.
If you feel that it didn't quite fit your workflow.
Or improvements can be made,
feel free to leave a thumbs down and share feedback on DevComm.
>> Awesome. Ultimately,
how does this info get curated?
Like who's putting this all together at the end the day.
>> Internally, we have a team
of folks who run the release pipeline.
We have what's called a QB or
quarterback that puts together the story for that release.
Internally, teams can submit features throughout
the minor releases and when GA comes the quarterback,
gets together with all of the PMs in the division and puts
together the final set of features and release story.
>> Awesome. If I wanted to share something about,
here's some cool extensions that you
should be using because that's the team I work on.
Then I can send them your way or
the QB's way and see them pop up for folks over here?
>> Exactly. When it comes to external features
and for teams that don't work within Developer Division,
maybe down the road,
that can be one of the capabilities that this supports.
>> Great. Talking more about being able to add content,
are there any plans to potentially expand that out
to a larger audience of people who
may have some cool tips and tricks to share?
That's a really good question.
I don't have a concrete answer.
Maybe that's a possibility for when we get this feature,
stabilized and run a few times and
get this into the hands of the wider audience.
>> That makes sense. I think that would
be on my personal wwish-list definitely just to see what
the community is really
into and wants to share out there with other people too.
>> That would be really cool. Then we can see from
the thumbs up and thumbs down what's popular with the community.
>> Sweet. What about you?
What's on your personal wwish-listfor
this experience in the feature?
>> I will love for something like this to
highlight developer requests from
the community like you mentioned.
If we could say highlight things
that I've personally requested on developer community
or things at different community members
have requested that'll be really cool.
>> Awesome. Also what happens if you click out of this experience?
Like once you boot up BS and you're ready to start coding,
but you want to come back to it without having
to reopen BS ideally,
is there a way to get back to this window again?
>> Yeah. Let's say I accidentally closed this experience.
I can go to the Help menu and then I can go to
what's new and it'll open it back up for me.
>> Awesome.
>> Yeah. I'm always accidentally closing windows
and then you've got to go back and try stuff.
>> I do it all the time.
I have way too many tabs.
It's like I'm just scared to leave
a tab or something because what if I
don't remember how to get back to it.
It's nice that there's an option.
>> Exactly. I mean,
I was being productive.
I never want to stop being productive with my million tabs.
>> That's the thing that freaks me out the most when my computer
start to restart without my permission,
it's like my god, all my 500 tabs that
I have open in Edge are going to be gone forever.
>> Exactly. Never going to be productive again.
>> Yeah. This will be the onetime
where the Restore feature doesn't
work and I don't get them back and it's going to be a nightmare.
>> Exactly. You need a version control for Edge.
>> Yes. Well, great,
thank you so much for showing off the What's New Experience.
I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes from here.
I've heard whispers of where it might go
in the future and I'm looking forward to that.
It's nice to just see sturdier version of like
the Visual Studio news that was
a cool classic for a lot of people make it's return.
>> Thanks for having me, Leslie.
It was fun to talk about the experience and hang out with you.
>> Yeah, likewise. With that you-all go
try out the what's
new experience if you haven't opened the Visual Studio recently.
With that happy coding.
[MUSIC]